Steven Spielberg becomes $10 billion man

Steven Spielberg has become the first moviemaker in history to gross $10 billion at the global box office.

His new release, Ready Player One, has taken the director past the milestone number, making him the most successful filmmaker ever, according to Box Office Mojo.

What makes the feat even more amazing is the fact that his nearest competition is blockbuster king Michael Bay and Peter Jackson, the man behind the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies – and they are both at least $3.5 billion behind Spielberg, whose hits have included Jurassic Park, E.T., Schindler’s List, Jaws, and the Indiana Jones movies.

And the new figures are just based on the films Spielberg has directed. If you count in the projects he has produced as well, his movies have amassed an estimated $17.2 billion, according to the website.Spielberg will soon be adding to his tally after announcing work has begun on a fifth Indiana Jones movie – the last to feature Harrison Ford as the adventurous professor of archaeology.

Meanwhile, the movie mogul recently revealed he doesn’t like watching his own films until years after they’re released.

“I’m always moving really fast, and I don’t look back a lot,” he told The New York Times. “That’s why I don’t sit down and look at my movies on a movie screen after I’ve made them. Sometimes it’s years before I will even dare look at a movie again, and sometimes I’ll shut it off after five minutes.”

And he’s no longer hooked on blockbusters and box office hits, insisting he prefers to create films with a deep social message, like Ready Player One – a dystopian vision of the future with overcrowded slum cities.

“I feel a deeper responsibility to tell stories that have some kind of social meaning,” he shared. “If I have a choice between a movie that is 100 per cent for the audience and a movie that says something about the past, I will always choose history over popular culture. Even with all the popcorn in a film like Ready Player One, it does still have social meaning.”